[tuukkah]

> It displays the hypermedia the way it is given without knowing the semantics at all - that's what makes it de-coupled from the server. It only knows the semantics of the hypermedia, in this case HTML.

I don't think this is true in the general case. Yes, you can make a hypermedia browser/"viewer" that doesn't understand any semantics apart from links and depends on HTML+CSS for presentation. But you can also make a hypermedia browser that knows the semantics such as microformats or RDFA.

JSON-LD is in a practical sweet spot because it has links and also structured data. Obviously, you don't view JSON-LD with a web browser directly but with a browser that has another presentation layer in place of / in addition to HTML+CSS. The downside is you have to agree on and implement a presentation layer, the upside is it can be much simpler than a web browser plus you get machine-readable data with semantics.